Following the release of Id Software's first person shooter RAGE, AMD has rolled out its newest performance driver made for those that want a little extra frames on their Radeon HD 6000 and HD 5000 series graphics cards.

The driver is simply called the Catalyst Rage performance driver and should bring significant performance gains for single GPU configurations on the Radeon HD 6000 and HD 5000 series cards. The new driver includes the latest OpenGL driver component for Rage performance optimizations.

As promised earlier, AMD officially revived its FX brand during the E3 show in Los Angeles. Despite the official announcement of the FX brand, there was no talk regarding the launch of the first FX series CPUs based on Bulldozer architecture.

The FX brand will be based around AMD's Scorpius platform that will consist of AM3+ FX series CPUs, codename Zambezi, the recently launched AMD 9-series chipset and Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards. AMD's Vice President of worldwide product marketing, Leslie Sobon said that AMD's FX brand will enable an over-the-top experience for PC enthusisast as well as an unrivaled feature set and amazing control over the PC performance by combining an unlocked, native eight-core CPU, latest chipset and AMD's latest graphics cards.

Unfortunately and despite the official announcement, we will not see the FX Series CPUs anytime soon as the recent rumours are pointing at September for availability.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 hit the market back in October last year and it was one of the first cards from the new AMD`s HD 6000 series. While it sports reference clocks, Sapphire has made a few changes to their design that separates this card from the other reference AMD designs. Note that reference clocks stand at 775MHz for the GPU and 1000MHz (4000MHz effectively) for the memory.

While the name HD 6850 might suggest so, it's not the successor to the HD 5850. The product isn't a straight replacement for the HD 5770 either. Actually AMD brought this product to the market in order to compete with Nvidia's Geforce GTX 460. Taking everything into account, HD 6850 offers a nice bang per buck.

It's well worth knowing, though that AMD has officially rebranded its HD 5700 Juniper based graphics cards to Radeon HD 6700 series. It appears that these rebrands are only for OEMs while retail/e-tail is still listing the HD 5700 series cards. The Radeon HD 6750 and the Radeon HD 6770 have the same specs as the HD 5750 and 5770 cards with added support for HDMI 1.4a.

Below you see GPUZ screenshot, confirming the clocks on our Sapphire HD 6850 card as well as the number of shaders (960).

Sapphire HD 6850 card is based on Barts core, which compared to the previous generation offers improvements on the field of tessellation, Eyefinity, video decoding and consumption. UVD engine is now in UVD 3 version; there’s also HDMI 1.4a for 3D Blu-ray as well as two DisplayPort 1.2 outs. The DisplayPorts support MultiStream technology, allowing up to 6 monitors to be used via only two DisplayPorts.

Sapphire HD 6850 packaging is eye catching, like always. Within the box (made of recycled paper), you’ll find the standard stuff as well as an HDMI 1.4a cable (1.8m).

Sapphire’s HD 6850 (11180-00-40R SKU) features reference clocks but Sapphire has made a few design changes. The card is 8.5 inches long (21.7cm), slightly shorter than the Radeon HD 5850, which also occupies two expansion slots. For reference, the Radeon HD 6870 measures 9.5" inches (24.1cm).

As you can see the card is strapped with special Sapphire designed cooling. The fan is 7.5cm in diameter and is connected to the 4-pin connector. Fan speed regulation can be performed via the Catalyst Overdrive or any other tool you may prefer. Sapphire's TriXXX tool will allow for GPU voltage changes. You can download it here, provided you register your card.

The memory chips are exposed and do not have a passive cooling solution on top of them.

The HD 6850 sports 256-bit memory bus like the HD 5800 series, rather than 128-bit like on HD 5770 cards. Sapphire HD 6850 (11180-00-40R SKU) card is equipped with 1024MB GDDR5 memory. The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix (model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C). They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (effective 5000 MHz).

The I/O panel features one DisplayPort 1.2 connector, one HDMI 1.4a and two DVI connectors (one of them is single-link with maximum resolution of 1920x1200).

Radeon HD 6850 consumes 127W at max so it will require one 6-pin power connector. Software GPU voltage control is possible. CHiL's CHL8214 voltage regulator supports voltage control via I2C and comes with extensive monitoring and tweaking features.

Just like the Radeon HD 6870, Radeon HD 6850 comes with only one CrossFire connector. This means that you can only use two cards in 2-way CrossFire.

TriXXX allowed us to boost GPU voltage to 1299mV, which helped in pushing the GPU all the way up to 985MHz. We were pretty surprised by the overclock we've achieved since most HD 6850 cards refused to run higher than 950MHz. However, note that overclocking results may vary from card to card and there is a realistic posibility that we've struck lucky. Overclocking helped us achieve up to 22% better results in Aliens vs Predator.

Temperatures

Sapphire HD 6850 will run quiet where GPU temperatures didn't exceed 69°C. Not even overclocking managed to push the temperatures beyond 76°C and the fan didn't run to loud either.

Power Consumption

Sapphire's HD 6850 consumes around 15W when idle, which is comparable with the green camp’s GTX 460. During operation, HD 6850's maximum consumption was about 25W less than on the GTX 460 1GB.

The card comes with nonreference cooling which is efficient when it comes to cooling the GPU, and fortunately, we can say it’s pretty quiet. Sapphire decided to leave the card at reference clocks, but we boosted it by additional 210MHz for the GPU and 160MHz for the memory (640MHz effectively). Overclocking helped us achieve up to 22% better results in Aliens vs Predator.

Radeon HD 6850 is not a high-end card but rather a product made with medium budgets in mind, the so called Gamers’ sweet spot card. The card hit the shelves at the end of October last year with priced at around €150. As you can see, the price is still the same.

As far as performance goes, Sapphire HD 6850 really puts AMD’s architecture improvements to good use. The card does pretty well in DirectX 11 games matching the HD 5850 and GTX 460 1GB in some benchmarks. Compared to the previous, HD 5800 generation, tessellation performance increase is visible.

If you’ve stuck to DirectX9 or DirectX10 hardware so far and you’re looking for a nicely priced graphics card that will allow for playing all the latest titles, then Sapphire’s HD 6850 should definitely make your list.

As we reported last week, TSMC is expected to report strong earnings for the fourth quarter thanks to large orders placed by AMD.

However, it's worth noting that AMD has placed orders for Ontario and Zacate APUs alongside HD 6000 GPUs. Both Ontario and Zacate are reportedly already in production, on TSMCs 40nm node. The Ontario will take on Intel's Atom processors in the netbook market and judging by the specs it should have no trouble wiping the floor with any Atom SKU.

Although AMD contracted Globalfoundries to produce the 32nm Llano APU, the company decided to go with TSMC's tried and tested 40nm process for Ontario and Zacate in order to mitigate production risks. All APUs produced by TSMC will be tested and packaged by Siliconware Precision Industries.

Just days after it released Catalyst 10.10, AMD has released not one, but two hotfixes for the driver pack.

The new drivers were ready in time for the HD 6800 launch and they were used in AMD internal testing weeks ago, if leaked slides are to be believed. However, the outfit has already introduced the 10.10a hotfix which we wrote about yesterday and the new one, dubbed 10.10c appeared today.

The latest hotfix delivers OpenGL 4.1 support as well as a few Crossfire performance improvements. Some performance optimizations for HD 6800 series boards in AvP, Starcraft 2 and Open GL are also included.

You can get it here. The hotfix is not officially supported by AMD, but we doubt anyone really cares.

The same set of slides that were leaked earlier today also show some details regarding AMD's product transition plan and it looks like AMD might pull the same stunt that Nvidia has been doing for years. Renaming, rebranding or whatever do you want to call it, is something that AMD plans to do with its HD 5700 Juniper based cards.

According to the slide, AMD's plan is to introduce the new Barts based cards that will be a direct successor of the Juniper, or to be precise, take the part of the market that belonged to Juniper based cards. Barts will be followed by Cayman-based cards that should show up in late November. Last but not least is the successor of Hemlock, the Antilles based dual-GPU card, which should show up in December.

According to the slide, Juniper based cards are here to stay, at least until the end of the year. AMD might rebrand these to HD 6700 series, considering that all the rumours so far suggest that Barts will be branded as HD 6800 series. Of course, as AMD still isn't officially talking about branding, so take this info with a grain of salt, as these things can easily change.

Some AMD partners that we talked to even suggest that Juniper might get a "minor improvement", but don't expect much as that will still be the same old Juniper GPU. We guess that the improvement might have something to do with outputs/Eyefinity features, but it is still to be confirmed.

A new set of leaked slides that have showed up over at Chiphell have revealed some details regarding the feature set of the upcoming Radeon HD 6000 series cards. As it was rumoured a while back, it is now pretty much confirmed that both Barts and Cayman boards will have support for up to six displays, thanks to DisplayPort 1.2 outputs.

The secret behind it is the MultiStream feature of DisplayPort 1.2, that has double the data-rate of DisplayPort 1.1. In addition to the higher data-rate, DP 1.2 also brings support for higher resolution support and support for stereoscopic 3D. The new HD 6000 will be able to support up to six DisplayPort displays by "daisy chaining" them to two Displayport outputs. The best part for AMD is that they can use Evergreen (Eyefinity 6) reference boards for this one since Barts and Cypress are pin compatible.

The rest of the outputs include HDMI 1.4 output for 3D video (Blu-ray 3D) support, and two dual-link DVI-I outputs. The slides also reveal that we can expect increased performance in every segment and AMD's UVD 3.0 video processing engine for GPU acceleration.

AMD would not bother to launch cards that are not faster than the previous generation, as this is simply the nature of things. They simply have to be faster than the previous generation.

We got confirmation that the HD 6000 series launch is still on schedule for October 18th and that Barts PRO and Barts XT are going to replace Cypress, Radeon HD 5800 series boards. This is a clear indication that the new card is going to end up faster than the Radeon HD 5850 and most likely HD 5870 which is something that most of us didn’t expect.

Still the real deal are Cayman PRO and XT that are scheduled to launch in November time, and these ones should once again raise the bar. Nvidia has something to counter the Northern Islands at least in the high end, but we still have to find out more details about it.

Antilles, the new Radeon HD 6970 dual X2 card should also launch later this year.

Digitimes is reporting that AMD has postponed the planned HD 6000 series by a few weeks. The cards were reportedly supposed to launch on October 12, but it appears that we won’t see them till November.

It’s not like AMD is in much of a hurry, as its old HD 5000 series is still more than a match for fresh Nvidia cards. It is rumoured that Nvidia will cut prices in October to keep up with AMD’s new parts. Nvidia is also planning to introduce the low-end GT 430 in mid-October.

However, it’s worth noting that Nvidia has already cut Fermi pricing several times this year. The GTX 460, which is arguably Nvidia’s most competitive card at the moment, is a good example. When it launched it retailed at €199, which quickly went down to €179 and then in went even lower, quite a bit lower in fact. At the moment, the GTX 460 is available for just €130 in some European markets.

In contrast, AMD has not adjusted the prices of most HD 5000 cards since their launch, nearly a year ago.

Update: Minutes after posting the story we were informed by some people in the know that the launch will indeed go ahead as planned. We can expect some fresh and tasty Radeons in two weeks, but mass availability should probably be expected sometime in November. As for Nvidia's price cuts, well it's not like they have much choice.